Scala Radio Book Club: Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake
Mark greeted the bestselling author of The Atlas Six, Olivie Blake into the Scala Radio Book Club on Thursday the 1st of December to discuss her latest novel Alone With You in the Ether.
Chicago, sometime. Two people meet in the armoury of the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. After their meeting, those things do not change.
Everything else, however, is slightly different.
Both obsessive, eccentric personalities, Aldo Damiani and Charlotte Regan struggle to be without each other from the moment they meet. The truth - that he is a clinically depressed, anti-social theoretician and she is a manipulative liar with a history of self-sabotage - means the deeper they fall in love, the more troubling their reliance on each other becomes.
Mark opened the interview by asking Olivie Blake about the main protagonists of her book: ‘These two characters are central to the story and the novel takes us through the early stages of their relationship via a series of often intense conversations. Just explain who they are and where they are in their lives as your story begins.’
‘So, we've got two very complicated protagonists who are living their lives separately and not very well. They have a variety of mental health complications. Regan is diagnosed with bipolar, is clinically depressed, and has some OCD. Aldo is on the spectrum. And I wanted to enter with a normal day. We basically walk into this book, meeting them for the first time on an extremely ordinary day. Filled with tedium, and then the next day they meet each other and all of a sudden, their lives change. And I wanted the book to have this feeling that suddenly, the world is filled with colour, but not necessarily in an idyllic, romantic kind of way. Perhaps there's too much colour.’
Mark asked: ‘Your writing career is going nuts at the moment; how did you first get started?’
‘I started writing basically on a whim. I started writing fan fiction because I had insomnia and I couldn't sleep one night and realized there was a whole community of people who were willing to hear what I had to say.
So, I wrote a lot of fan fiction. I started self-publishing books because I felt like there were some stories that weren't right for the traditional market, but I also wanted to use my own world and my own characters. I was trying to be traditionally published and I was getting feedback like: “this story doesn't speak to me”. And that was when I was realising, maybe it won't speak to publishing, the institution, but maybe it will speak to individuals, maybe people who are already accustomed to my writing style or have lived stories like mine will enjoy this. And so, I self-published it. I don't know what happened, The Atlas Six took off, another self-published title, and somehow that has led to today.
Mark asked Olivie Blake about her bipolar disorder: ‘How much does your bipolar disorder feed into this? Because we've talked to people on the show before who have said if I didn't have this condition, which does give me these extraordinary lows, I would not be able to have the career that I have because when I am on a high, I am going for it’
‘Yes, absolutely. One of the things I wanted to say with Alone With You in the Ether is that when a person is manic, it's hard not to be in love with them because they are truly on top of the world, and I wanted to show the ways that it is euphoric. And dangerous at the same time. It was something I wanted to write.
I have this now very complicated love story with my own brain and, in a lot of ways I feel the same way about my creativity that Regan does about hers, that it is a gift, and it is also a curse, and it's accepting that it is both those things at once, that makes it a love story.’
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